Ex-Chinese Official Gets 15 Months Jail in Singapore

Li Huabo, a former local government
official accused of a 94 million yuan ($15 million) fraud in
China, was sentenced to 15 months in jail for receiving stolen
money in his Singapore bank accounts.

Judge Siva Shanmugam said Li’s crimes involved some degree
of sophistication when handing down his verdict and sentence
yesterday after an 18-day trial. Li’s bail was doubled to
S$160,000 ($129,292) pending a possible appeal.

Li had testified he was coerced into making a confession to
police that he masterminded a scheme to embezzle the funds. The
former section director at Poyang county’s finance bureau in
China’s southeastern Jiangxi province had denied three charges
of receiving S$182,700 in stolen money in his Singapore
accounts, claiming he was framed by former co-workers. The case
had received prominent media coverage in China.

“This kind of phenomenon attracts considerable attention
because it might show that corruption runs so deep that even
cadres at such a low level can accumulate wealth at such a
size,” said Joseph Cheng, a political science professor at City
University of Hong Kong.

Chinese prosecutors investigated 47,338 cases of official
misconduct in 2012, 5 percent more than the previous year, and
recovered 8.8 billion yuan. Since the 1990s, about 18,000
officials and state employees have left with some 800 billion
yuan, according to a report by the Chinese central bank that
briefly appeared on its website in 2011.

Money Laundering

Li, 51, will appeal the verdict, his lawyer Subhas Anandan
said yesterday. Anandan had argued for a shorter sentence, given
the amount of money and his age. Prosecutor Luke Tan had asked
for a jail term of 14 to 18 months.

Setting up the use of bank accounts in Singapore to funnel
dirty money across international boundaries is deplorable and
“could result in Singapore gaining an undesirable reputation as
a haven for money laundering,” Tan said.

Judge Shanmugam had rejected Li’s allegations of coercion
and ruled that his confessions were voluntary.

For each charge, Li could have been jailed for as long as
five years and fined an unspecified amount. Li claimed his
personal wealth including S$1.5 million used to obtain his
Singapore permanent residency and a S$1.3 million three-bedroom
apartment in the city-state was built through businesses on the
sidelines and not by siphoning public funds.

Remittance Agent

“There were no embezzled funds at all,” Li said when he
took the stand in February, rejecting the prosecutor’s claim
that he plotted with his co-workers to steal from the county.
“They were all my own money.”

Li allegedly set up a shell company in 2006 and used bogus
government seals and fake invoices to steal millions, Tan said
at the trial.

Li was arrested in March 2011 after Singapore police acted
on a tip-off from his remittance agent and a request from
Beijing via Interpol. Singapore and China don’t have an
extradition treaty.

Li’s hometown Poyang is one of China’s poorest counties and
named after what was once the country’s largest freshwater lakes
before drought and dams shrunk it from 4,000 square kilometers
to 200.

Macau Trips

Outside of his official job at the finance bureau which
paid him 3,000 yuan a month, Li traded coal, cotton and
fertilizer, ran a tourist agency organizing trips to Macau, and
had a 42 percent stake in an oil refinery. Li said he made about
100 million yuan in three years from his investment in the oil
refinery business.

Local Chinese government party officials set up a task
force, dubbed the “2-11 team” after Feb. 11, when Li allegedly
called a colleague, confessing to stealing from the government.
Li said he never made such a call, which was part of a setup to
frame him.

On Feb. 17, 2011, state-run news agency Xinhua published a
report with a hand-drawn picture of Li that was broadcast on
major state-run television stations.

The investigation netted 57 people, including the finance
bureau chief who was sentenced to 19 years in jail for his role
in the embezzlement.